RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)


  • The Real AIpocalypse Is Probably Already Here

    Source: Garrison Center
    by Thomas L Knapp

    “Suppose you carefully, intentionally avoid AI and its product, for whatever reason. Maybe you distrust its output. Maybe you just prefer to do your own research, and reach your own conclusions, from primary human-created sources. But how can you know AI-generated content hasn’t previously ‘polluted’ the human-created sources with ‘facts’ that aren’t true? … People have always lied, and often those lies have persisted and spread, becoming ‘common knowledge’ despite being false. AI, linked to a mechanism of near-instantaneous global spread (the Internet), can produce and distribute lies far faster than humans once did by word of mouth or through print on paper.” (04/11/26)

    https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20537

  • Employers Are Moving Beyond Educational Pedigree. It’s Time We All Do

    Source: Washington Monthly
    by Ryan Stowers

    “I have a message for parents: A four-year degree from a top-tier university does not guarantee career success or fulfillment. College is just one path. In a world where technology is rapidly changing our jobs and hiring managers question whether college graduates have the skills needed to succeed, parents and young people should examine the range of post-high school options. Employers certainly are, and they are embracing new pathways to address the workforce gaps they have experienced over decades.” (04/10/26)

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/10/employers-are-moving-beyond-the-college-degree/

  • Every Mass Movement Needs a Devil. Socialism Always Finds One.

    Source: Mindset Shifts
    by Barry Brownstein

    “In The True Believer, a seminal book on mass movements by social philosopher Eric Hoffer, Hoffer writes: ‘Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.’ … An essential feature of socialism is to dehumanize others. Like millions in Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Mao’s China, millions of North Koreans have been taught to hate others. Millions in the ‘hostile class’ have been starved, brutalized, and murdered. Socialism will never produce a different outcome. How is it possible to insist that the next socialist regime will be different?” (04/11/26)

    https://mindsetshifts.substack.com/p/every-mass-movement-needs-a-devil

  • The Department of Education: Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead?

    Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
    by Wendy McElroy

    “The continuing backlash against public schools, exemplified by the amazing rise of homeschooling, favors an easy abolition of the DOE. Nothing less than eliminating the agency will turn the tide of America’s culture war. An ideology masquerading as education aims at defining people’s thoughts and beliefs, which is the ultimate form of social control. In the foreword to his dystopian novel, Brave New World (1946 edition), Aldous Huxley commented, ‘A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.’ Public schools are both expressions of and a training ground for such an army. Ideally, all education should private, and society is moving in this direction.” (04/10/26)

    https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-department-of-education-ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead/

  • Municipalism, Anarchism, and Polyarchy

    Source: Center for a Stateless Society
    by Kevin Carson

    “From the 19th century utopian socialists on, Henri de Saint-Simon’s concept of replacing ‘legislation over persons’ with the ‘administration of things’ has been reiterated in various forms by one thinker after another. In General Idea of the Revolution in the XIX Century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon described it as ‘dissolving the state in the social body.’ Marx and Engels referred to the same process as the state ‘withering away,’ and it clearly influenced Marx’s view of the Paris Commune as prefiguring the dictatorship of the proletariat. Since then, the same general principle has been restated by countless anarchists and libertarian socialists.” (04/10/26)

    https://c4ss.org/content/61101

  • AI and the Wiki Wars

    Source: Quillette
    by Russell T Warne

    “For years, Wikipedia has been one of the informational backbones of the internet. With over seven million articles in the English version, Wikipedia is — by far — the largest repository of human knowledge ever collected. … Wikipedia has seen many challengers to its dominance, often motivated by its perceived inadequacies. … The reason Wikipedia’s challengers have been so feeble is that none of them have offered a new model that can accomplish Wikipedia’s purpose of delivering information to its users. All the competitors function the same way as Wikipedia: as a volunteer-driven community of users who update and expand the encyclopaedia through crowdsourcing. Without any major advantages in fulfilling the basic function of an encyclopaedia, editors and readers have little reason to defect from Wikipedia (or to stay if they do). Enter Grokipedia.” (04/11/26)

    https://quillette.com/2026/04/11/ai-and-the-wiki-wars-grokipedia-wikipedia-elon-musk/

  • The Security Leviathan

    Source: Liberal Currents
    by Kathleen Frydl

    “Following decades of unprecedented expansion in security, detention, and surveillance, the United States government’s competence in militancy and punishment is now so dominant that it threatens to eclipse its other activities and ambitions. We are close to a point when, regardless of who is elected, the government will function like a hammer and every problem will look like a nail. As a result, at this critical juncture, opposition to the Trump administration will have to decide whether to offer a strategic vision for the direction of the American state, or cast their movement as an objection to just one person, a particular agency, or a certain issue viewed in isolation and presented as aberrational.” (04/11/26)

    https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-security-leviathan/

  • America is the New Rome

    Source: spiked

    “The American empire is arrogant, brutal and yet completely indispensable to Western civilisation.” (04/11/26)

    https://archive.is/mGbX6

  • Democrats and Republicans Both Want To Regulate AI. They Just Can’t Agree on How.

    Source: Reason
    by Jack Nicastro

    “As lawmakers of both major parties hustle to regulate their preferred villains, they’re losing sight of the big picture. The possible gains to humanity from AI are enormous.” (for publication 05/26)

    https://reason.com/2026/04/11/democrats-and-republicans-both-want-to-regulate-ai-they-just-cant-agree-on-how/

  • Where wit and wisdom disarm disinformation

    Source: Christian Science Monitor
    by staff

    “Even as the European Union works to bolster economic and defense support for Ukraine, the continent is confronting increasing Russian aggression on a different battlefield: the online frontier. Over the past year, the Kremlin has intensified its disinformation campaigns in an attempt to weaken Europe’s democratic pillars of truth and civic trust. As the main target of these intensified attacks, France is at the forefront of efforts to document and debunk these claims. ‘The more outspoken France has become about Russia, the more it is targeted,’ The Economist reported April 8. It documented multiple instances in which false claims on social media were launched almost immediately after French President Emmanuel Macron expressed support for Ukraine or European rearmament.” (04/10/26)

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0410/Where-wit-and-wisdom-disarm-disinformation

  • Jury Trials Are Vital to the Constitutional Order

    Source: Brownstone Institute
    by David Thunder

    “The campaign against jury trials, one of the most free-spirited and universally lauded institutions bequeathed to us by the common law tradition, would be baffling in a healthy constitutional regime. But sadly, it is predictable enough in a regime whose political leaders have developed the habit of tinkering with civil liberties as though they were trimming their lawn.” (04/11/26)

    https://brownstone.org/articles/jury-trials-are-vital-to-the-constitutional-order/

  • Mark Levin Seems Upset We Haven’t Nuked Iran

    Source: The American Conservative
    by Jack Hunter

    “The neoconservative talk host tried to normalize the use of nuclear weapons and now appears irate that the president hasn’t taken his advice.” (04/11/26)

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/mark-levin-seems-upset-we-havent-nuked-iran/

  • The future arrived this week.

    Source: Nonzero Newsletter
    by Robert Wright

    “This week Anthropic announced that it has a new large language model that’s way more powerful than past models — so powerful that it poses a threat to the world’s information infrastructure. This model can find otherwise unfindable vulnerabilities in software — and in fact, said Anthropic, has found previously unknown holes in every major operating system and browser. … if this model fell into the wrong hands, that could be big trouble — which is why, says Anthropic, there are no plans to release the model for the time being. Some people have wondered whether Anthropic’s claims about the terrifying power of this new model are mainly marketing hype — a suspicion that isn’t exactly discouraged by the model’s name: Mythos. But Anthropic is making Mythos available to big companies that maintain important parts of the digital infrastructure, like Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco. So if these claims were hugely exaggerated, word of that would get out …” (04/11/26)

    https://www.nonzero.org/p/the-future-arrived-this-week

  • Why black male students are hurt the most by lowered academic expectations

    Source: New York Post
    by Dennis Richmond, Jr.

    “I’m a middle school teacher in New York, and what’s happening inside many classrooms today should concern every parent in this country, especially parents of Black boys. Education is supposed to be about reading, writing, history, discipline and accountability. Instead, in too many schools, academics are being pushed aside while politics, ideology and lowered expectations take their place. The students who can least afford to fall behind (particularly young Black boys) are the ones being hurt the most. The data shows this is not just opinion, it’s reality. According to the New York State Education Department’s 2024-2025 assessment results, proficiency rates in English and math remain far below where they should be, with major gaps between racial groups. Black students in New York City were only about 47% proficient in English and 43% proficient in math, compared with much higher rates for white and Asian students.” (04/11/26)

    https://nypost.com/2026/04/11/opinion/black-male-students-lose-the-most-when-schools-forget-about-academics/

  • Conservative women are as likely as liberal men to say words are violence

    Source: Expression
    by Chapin Lenthall-Cleary

    “I’ve previously discussed surprising results around tolerance for hypothetical controversial speakers, including the fact that male college students are substantially more tolerant — so much so, in fact, that male students are often more tolerant of their political enemies than female students are of their own allies. One might wonder whether this is true of the general population as well. Our data on the general population is less comprehensive than our student data. We don’t ask the same speaker-tolerance questions. But we do ask people whether they agree with the claim, ‘Words can be violence.'” (04/11/26)

    https://expression.fire.org/p/conservative-women-are-as-likely